1. Field of Invention
The present invention generally relates to processing search queries and, more particularly, to methods and systems for processing ambiguous, reduced text, search queries and highlighting results thereof.
2. Description of Related Art
There are many user-operated devices such as mobile phones, PDAs (personal digital assistants), and television remote control devices that have small keypads, which a user can use for text entry. In many of these devices, largely because of device size constraints, the keypad is small and has only a small number of keys, which are overloaded with alpha-numeric characters. Text input using these keypads is cumbersome.
FIG. 1 illustrates a common twelve-key keypad interface found in many cell phones and other mobile devices, and also increasingly in devices like television remote control devices. The keypad 10 includes twelve keys 12, most of which are overloaded with multiple alpha-numeric characters or functions. The same key can be pressed to enter different characters. For instance, the “2” key can be used to enter the number “2” and the letters “A”, “B” and “C”. Text entry using such a keypad with overloaded keys can result in an ambiguous text entry, which requires some type of a disambiguation action. For instance, with a so-called multi-press interface, a user can press a particular key multiple times in quick succession to select a desired character (e.g., to choose “B”, the user would press the “2” key twice quickly, and to choose “C”, the user would press the key three times quickly). Alternatively, text entry can be performed using the so-called T9 and other text input mechanisms that provide vocabulary based completion choices for each word entered. Neither of these methods is however particularly suitable for use in performing searches because of the number of steps needed to get to the result. One deficiency of the multi-press interface is that too many key strokes are needed. A drawback of applying a vocabulary based word completion interface is the need for the additional step of making a choice from a list of all possible word matches generated by the ambiguous text input. Furthermore vocabulary based word disambiguation systems are designed typically for composition applications (as opposed to search applications) where user explicitly disambiguates each word by performing a word completion action to resolve that word before proceeding to the next word in the composition. This deficiency is even more apparent for a multi-word search system where results could ideally be obtained by the entry of just a few characters. These methods suffer from the fact that the fewer the number of characters entered, the greater the ambiguity of the input. (The ambiguity decreases as the input character count increases.) This has the undesirable consequence of reducing the usefulness of a search engine that has the potential to retrieve results with just a few input characters.